Madame Bovary eBook

Charles’s conversation was commonplace as a
street pavement, and everyone’s ideas trooped
through it in their everyday garb, without exciting
emotion, laughter, or thought. He had never had
the curiosity, he said, while he lived at Rouen, to
go to the theatre to see the actors from Paris.
He could neither swim, nor fence, nor shoot, and one
day he could not explain some term of horsemanship
to her that she had come across in a novel.

A man, on the contrary, should he not know everything,
excel in manifold activities, initiate you into the
energies of passion, the refinements of life, all
mysteries? But this one taught nothing, knew nothing,
wished nothing. He thought her happy; and she
resented this easy calm, this serene heaviness, the
very happiness she gave him.

Sometimes she would draw; and it was great amusement
to Charles to stand there bolt upright and watch her
bend over her cardboard, with eyes half-closed the
better to see her work, or rolling, between her fingers,
little bread-pellets. As to the piano, the more
quickly her fingers glided over it the more he wondered.
She struck the notes with aplomb, and ran from top
to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus
shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed,
could be heard at the other end of the village when
the window was open, and often the bailiff’s
clerk, passing along the highroad bare-headed and in
list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper
in his hand.

Emma, on the other hand, knew how to look after her
house. She sent the patients’ accounts
in well-phrased letters that had no suggestion of
a bill. When they had a neighbour to dinner on
Sundays, she managed to have some tasty dish—­piled
up pyramids of greengages on vine leaves, served up
preserves turned out into plates—­and even
spoke of buying finger-glasses for dessert. From
all this much consideration was extended to Bovary.

Charles finished by rising in his own esteem for possessing
such a wife. He showed with pride in the sitting
room two small pencil sketched by her that he had
had framed in very large frames, and hung up against
the wallpaper by long green cords. People returning
from mass saw him at his door in his wool-work slippers.

He came home late—­at ten o’clock,
at midnight sometimes. Then he asked for something
to eat, and as the servant had gone to bed, Emma waited
on him. He took off his coat to dine more at his
ease. He told her, one after the other, the people
he had met, the villages where he had been, the prescriptions
ha had written, and, well pleased with himself, he
finished the remainder of the boiled beef and onions,
picked pieces off the cheese, munched an apple, emptied
his water-bottle, and then went to bed, and lay on
his back and snored.

As he had been for a time accustomed to wear nightcaps,
his handkerchief would not keep down over his ears,
so that his hair in the morning was all tumbled pell-mell
about his face and whitened with the feathers of the
pillow, whose strings came untied during the night.
He always wore thick boots that had two long creases
over the instep running obliquely towards the ankle,
while the rest of the upper continued in a straight
line as if stretched on a wooden foot. He said
that “was quite good enough for the country.”